Critical Horizons

A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

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Of(f) Course: Michel Foucault, the Mobile

Philosopher and his Dreamworlds

Marianna Papastephanou

To cite this article: Marianna Papastephanou (2019) Of(f) Course: Michel Foucault,
the Mobile Philosopher and his Dreamworlds, Critical Horizons, 20:1, 1-19, DOI:
10.1080/14409917.2019.1563994

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2019.1563994

Published online: 17 Jan 2019.

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CRITICAL HORIZONS
2019, VOL. 20, NO. 1, 1–19
https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2019.1563994

Of(f) Course: Michel Foucault, the Mobile Philosopher and his

Dreamworlds
Marianna Papastephanoua,b
a
Department of Education, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus; bDepartment of Education, Faculty of
Educational Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc Iranian revolution; parrhesia;
that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, utopia; modernisation;
he wrote: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that knowledge; history
they are wrong”. Examining Foucault’s (so unlikely) valorisation of
certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge
and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian
revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach
Foucault’s Iranian writings as aberration; against this tendency, I
read them as an effect of Foucault’s specific epistemic and
utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of
Foucault’s comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing
when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault’s
interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political
identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and
outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream
appraisals of Foucault’s political philosophy.

Introduction
Foucault is “far too often seen as an essentially Eurocentric thinker who had little to say
about the world outside of Europe”.1 Yet, Foucault went off-course when, upon accepting a
Corriere della Sera journalistic assignment, he travelled to Iran in 1978 and dispatched a
series of reportages d’idées.2 However, Foucault’s fascination with the Iranian revolution
exposed his position to unusual public scrutiny and to unprecedented attacks. It has
also caused an ongoing controversy concerning how to interpret and critique the intellec-
tual’s stand on an issue of international politics.3
Readings of Foucault’s reportages d’idées may be grouped as critical-explanatory, inter-
pretive-neutral and defensive.4 Some of Foucault’s detractors have accused him of orient-
alism, nostalgia and anti-modernism or charge him with Nietzschean and Heideggerian
(philosophical and political) complicities.5 Such opponents are then accused by some Fou-
cauldians of finger-pointing, moralism and Islamophobia.
There are also middle-ground positions and points of convergence between opponents
and proponents. A by now common and pertinent claim in the relevant literature is “that

CONTACT Marianna Papastephanou edmari@ucy.ac.cy Department of Education, University of Cyprus, PO BOX

20537 Nicosia 1678, Cyprus
© Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2019
2 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

Foucault’s Iranian writings shed light on his work of this period”.6 A main tendency is also
to concede that Foucault was led astray in the case of Iran and to give one major expla-
nation of this aberration. Most critics imply that, if Foucault had remained within safe ter-
ritory (instead of exploring uncharted waters), he would not have been blown off-course.
For instance, Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson7 “charge that Foucault made fundamental
errors of political judgment”; to them, it “was clearly a misstep in political judgment made
in the context of an uncharacteristic foray into topical journalism”.8 However, it is striking
that, as I explain in a later section, Foucauldian scholars also come to this astonishing, very
un-Foucauldian conclusion of blaming displacements that set the philosopher off-course. I
consider un-Foucauldian the underlying assumption that we must limit ourselves to the
standard, familiar and safe practice. Contra such explanations and conclusions, I argue
that Foucault did not go far enough, beyond his “internal” epistemic and political
borders. His own displacement was too limited to allow him a different optics of Iran
due to reasons inter alia embedded in his outlook on epistemology, politics and utopics.
Thus, while acknowledging the significance of the controversy as it has unfolded, I take
issue with the tendency toward one explanation. In the effort to defend a clear, argumen-
tative thesis and to stake out a clear debate to engage, most theorists neglect the synergy of
important aspects of Foucault’s problematic. Ultimately, they reduce political stakes to
faulty moral psychology. By contrast, my reading of Foucault’s Iranian writings presup-
poses and operates on a fabric of interwoven immanent and transcendent critiques of Fou-
cault’s authorial decisions and positionings. I hope that this reading makes room for a
more complex approach to the Iranian writings. This facilitates a multi-faceted epistemic
and political account not of what might be said to have “de-routed” Foucault but of why
Foucault was not “derailed” and “de-subjectivated” enough when discussing Iran. A
complex approach to Foucault’s Iranian writings may be needed to set on course a
more critical outlook on his political philosophy, its reception and hegemony in many
fields and its framing of many current understandings of global politics.

The journey
Foucault’s journey to Iran disrupted the rhythms of an intellectual course inwardly
focused on mechanisms of power within Western statehood. Reaching out, moving east-
ward and outside of the archive, Foucault momentarily bracketed his ordinary research
patterns to explore utopian possibilities for which he deeply longed.9 He perceived the
Iran of 1978 as a radically other, non-European space which could escape modernisation.
Iran offered him an outward perspective from which to frame a radical alternative to
Western modernity.
Indicative of this expectation is Foucault’s employment of the Iranian uprising as a
topical illustration of why and how a revolt is politically, ethically and aesthetically
superior to the modern revolutionary spirit. In making this point, Foucault also criticised
the centripetal and domesticating way in which public opinion gets interested in what
happens elsewhere:
After I left Iran, the question that I was constantly asked was, of course: “Is this revolution ?”
(This is the price at which, in France, an entire sector of public opinion becomes interested in
that which is “not about us”). I did not answer, but I wanted to say that it is not a revolution,
not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out.10
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 3

What is, then, for Foucault, a revolt which escapes the confines of Western modernity and
deserves the fascination that he felt?
It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of
the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil
workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection
against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.11

To the surprise of many Foucauldian disciples, Foucault is thrilled rather than appalled by
the religiousness of the revolt, which he sees as an instantiation of political spirituality.12
His enthusiasm13 is for a spirituality that produces resistant subjectivities and for a politi-
cal fervour long forgotten in the West.
Foucault’s likely and unlikely reading of the revolt does not apply his usual, complex
categories of power other than sporadically (e.g. the panoptical gaze of the shah14). It
resorts to more conventional conceptual tools, involving a vocabulary of victims, domina-
tion and liberation. Foucault stresses the paradox of barehanded defeat of a most powerful
army and praises unity over Babel-like multivocality. For him, typical of this revolt is that
it “has brought out – and few peoples in history have had this – an absolutely collective
will”. Until his journey, collective will was to Foucault “a political myth with which
jurists and philosophers try to analyze or to justify institutions” and “a theoretical tool:
nobody has ever seen the ‘collective will’ and, personally, I thought that the collective
will was like God, like the soul, something one would never encounter”.15 His journey
to Iran familiarises Foucault with the possibility of an effected consensus – not of the
Habermasian, communicative-rationality type (which Foucault disliked), but one
secured by a religious spirit which annuls internal disputes and is not based on the
force of the better argument. For Foucault, this rare concordance erupts in the quotidian
and changes its course: “I don’t know whether you agree with me, but we met, in Tehran
and throughout Iran, the collective will of a people. Well, you have to salute it; it doesn’t
happen every day”.16
The collectivity which Foucault encounters is no culturalist folklore but an operative
and energetic national (id)entity17 which produces a political will against institutionalised
power. In yet another unlikely move, Foucault challenges social construction with a
segment of reality, for he contrasts real national consciousness to the fabricated one of
Shah’s “liberal” nation-building: “because it was the Shi’ite religion that in fact constituted
the real principle of national consciousness, Reza Shah, in order to dissociate the two, tried
to propagate a notion of ‘Aryanness’, whose sole support was the myth of Aryan purity”.
Against liberal instrumentalist assumptions that people can identify with just any con-
structed identity/imaginary community, Foucault emphasises grassroots resistance: “in
the eyes of the people, what did it mean to discover one fine day that they were
Aryans? It was nothing more than seeing the two-thousand year-old monarchy being cele-
brated today on the ruins of Persepolis”.18
Foucault may have wrongly valorised that specific theorisation of patriotism and that
specific version of nationalism in Iran.19 But I find it important that, even in this way, Fou-
cault’s position complicates current facile treatments of collective affect and acknowledges
the affective as a real and potentially enabling force of resistance. What Foucault embraced
in Iran subverts many positions that have been held in his name within academic dis-
courses. Strikingly, Foucault’s certainties affirm a patriotic idiom of insurrection where
4 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

an unusual “rejection of foreigners” is not a sign of xenophobia but a national affirmation

of self-determination and resistance against global meddlers:
Of course, in the independence struggles, in the anticolonial wars, one finds similar phenom-
ena. In Iran the national sentiment has been extremely vigorous: the rejection of submission
to foreigners, disgust at the looting of national resources, the rejection of a dependent foreign
policy, the American interference that was visible everywhere, have been determinants in the
shah’s being perceived as a Western agent. But national feeling has, in my opinion, been only
one of the elements of a still more radical rejection: the rejection by a people, not only of
foreigners, but of everything that had constituted, for years, for centuries, its political
destiny.20

Unlike current approaches which overlook effects of international hegemonies and reify
global pathologies through a handful of key-words of evil where xenophobia prominently
figures, Foucault’s position involves a nuanced fear of foreigners. The philosopher who
inspired generations of disciples to give xenophobia the status of the utmost political
problem and explanatorily to reduce to xenophobic-nationalist reaction just any criti-
cal-patriotic resistance to intervention justifies “rejecting foreigners” as a sign of rejecting
dependence. “What” were the foreigners that Foucault loathed? Not the category of
foreigner as such, as his critics (eager to find contradictions and failures) assume, but
the geopolitical category of meddlers. Taking the 1953 Iran coup as an example, we
may personify this category through liberals such as “ambassadors and military advisers
actively participating in the overthrow” of Mossadeq; CIA and MI6 agents who “distrib-
uted ‘grey propaganda’, funded demonstrations, played ‘dirty tricks’”; those who “urged
officers to carry out the coup” against Mossadeq; Americans and British who “worked
through local Nazis, and had a direct role in kidnappings, assassinations, torture, and
mass street killings”.21
However, Foucault is not only hostile to geopolitical foreign meddling but also to
modern intellectual infectious rationalism translated into bourgeois politics. Ironically,
the mobile philosopher who, at more sedentary moments, politicised the modern fear
of contamination by otherness (the “erring” other, the perverse, the mad, etc) now con-
siders modern influences threatening (in the political sphere rather than in that of individ-
ual encounters). Though Mossadeq’s resistance could have offered Foucault a more
democratic example of alternative to the shah, Foucault is suspicious of modern elements
in Mossadeq’s legacy. Hence, Foucault taxonomically orders secular and democratic
Iranian opposition as “bourgeois-nationalist”22 or “socialist-oriented”.23 Foucault has
been accused of orientalism, but, I think, precisely the point about contamination
justifies one commentator’s view that his is an “inverted Orientalism”;24 for, Foucault’s
dreamworld is of authentic and pure Otherness uncontaminated by Western modernity.25
Foucault claims that Iranian people categorically rejected modernisation, for he declares
just any modernisation dead in its tracks. Thus, Foucault as a “Western traveller
appears to have stumbled upon a univocal mass whose spiritual elation” will compensate
“for the grueling labor and material burdens of the premodern life to which they are more
than willing to return in order to fend off the deadening, corrupting influences of Western
industrialism’s ‘world without spirit’”.26
The dystopian regime of the shah invited Foucault’s critical-utopian response. The
utopian vision in question was of a processual, formalist kind where the content of the
utopia (in this case, the specific version of Islamic politics and how it positions diverse
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 5

citizens) did not matter. Foucault’s Iranian, indeterminate utopia evokes rupture, excep-
tionalism, exalted alternatives to modernism typical of much French postmodern
thought mixed with a curiously and strikingly modernist glorification of natality. This
natality, the “birth of ideas” at which the philosopher wants to be present is evident in
the following extract from his November 1978 text:
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active,
stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at
the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but
in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them’.27

Likewise, Foucault utopianizes the non-abstract character of the revolt: “this collective will,
which, in our theories, is always general, has found for itself, in Iran, an absolutely clear,
particular aim, and has thus erupted into history”.28
Foucault rejoices in the political possibilities that he attaches to eruptive and disruptive
energy. But he will see those possibilities shattered less than a year after making his hopes
public. The events in Iran after the success of the revolt made some French intellectuals29
in 1979 confident enough to ask Foucault to acknowledge his error of judgment. Foucault
responded by reminding them of his work on confession and of his bios theoretikos, i.e. his
avoidance of public polemics. Foucault would not respond to the content of the charges
“because throughout ‘my life’ I have never taken part in polemics. I have no intention
of beginning now”. Foucault’s averted gaze had “another reason, also based on principles.
I am ‘summoned to acknowledge my errors.’ This expression and the practice it designates
remind me of something and of many things, against which I have fought”.30
Slightly later, he responded to the accumulated evidence of the revolt having gone awry
with the rhetorical modality of Kantian-like principle/maxim: “One must be respectful
when a singularity arises and intransigent as soon as the state violates universals”.31 Sig-
nificantly, this is found in Foucault’s last self-standing commentary on Iran entitled: “Is It
Useless to Revolt?” This title evokes an important, Kant-reminiscent retrieval of use-less-
ness against glorifications of utilitarian logistics of gains and losses. In the same commen-
tary, Foucault prepares the ground for the above, principled conclusion about singularity
and universality with the following aphorism: “It is certainly not shameful to change one’s
opinions, but there is no reason to say that one’s opinion has changed when one is against
hands being chopped off today, after having been against the tortures of the SAVAK
yesterday”.32
After May 1979, Foucault is thought to be back on course. Commentators overlook
Foucault’s later interview (May 22, 1981) with Jean François and John de Vit33 where Fou-
cault was asked:
You said in an interview in 1973, I think, that you were opposed to popular tribunals. You
made reference to the example of China. One could also speak today of Iran, where the Aya-
tollah Khomeini no longer even knows how many people must be executed. What do you
think of these tribunals? (263).34

Foucault responded as follows:

You know perfectly well that if we created juries that were entirely popular, the death penalty
would be applied to everyone, even the most minor thieves. So there is this background of
social warfare: he who steals wages war; he who is robbed fights the one who stole. This
6 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

should not be forgotten. So it is necessary to have the courage to say that justice serves to
prevent this rather than to translate it. The popular tribunal translates it. Khomeini is pre-
cisely this. Once again, this discussion was misunderstood. People saw an apology for this
form of justice that is not even a kind of popular tribunal, but rather the cutting of
throats. No, no.35

Aberration
Later responses to Foucault’s Iran episode range from scathing attacks to condescending
reactions. As such, the journey and the related writings are mostly treated as aberration.
From the Latin “aberro”, “wander away, go astray”, in the same etymological family with
error,36 aberration comes to normalise reverent readings of Foucault that set Iran aside or
to support moralist readings that dismiss Foucault wholesale. The philosopher-wanderer’s
momentary departure from what was typical of him or expected from him is thus con-
sidered a deviation from his usual course. To opponents, the normal route from which
Foucault was derailed explains the aberration as the inevitable result of a politically com-
plicit Lebensphilosophie à la Nietzsche and Heidegger. To proponents, the aberration is
ignored/forgotten/forgiven; or useful in a merely scholarly, detached way. The latter pos-
ition considers Foucault misguided concerning Iran but focuses more on how his Iranian
writings can nevertheless illuminate his work or how his work illuminates those writings
exegetically rather than critically.
I argue that Foucault’s Iranian experience and writings should neither be theorised
through idioms of inadvertence and misdirection nor presented as a matter of prognosti-
cation and clear vision of the future. As I see it, the whole issue does not boil down to
unpredictability of the revolutionary outcome, which was not, in any case, of much inter-
est to Foucault. Indeed, Foucault was no seer and he should not be expected to be one. But,
I argue later, there is, to a degree, an issue of blindness and deafness to facts happening
there and then and to warnings made by a woman interlocutor who parrhesiastically con-
fronted Foucault in a newspaper letter. Blindness and deafness, evident in his Iranian writ-
ings, support the argument that Foucault was epistemically and politically not adequately
displaced when approaching Iran. Why? In my view, because those Foucauldian certain-
ties that devalued episteme, judgment, and fact- or evidence-based history made him uto-
pianize a specific politicisation of religion and led him to project his own hopes onto the
revolt. The philosophical dreamworld of Foucault (his imaginary philosophical universe)
did not contain evidence-based knowledge: “I dream of the intellectual destroyer of evi-
dence” and of the intellectual who “incessantly displaces himself”.37 Such certainties
along with his missing bits of knowledge about Iran allowed him a limit-experience38
that had only belated self-displacing effects.39

Knowledge(s)
In “À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?” [What are the Iranians dreaming about?], Foucault
extolled Iranian “political spirituality” and, anticipating reactions, he wrote:
The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both above and below
the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For the people who inhabit this land,
what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 7

possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a pol-
itical spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.40

Foucault’s (so unlikely) assertion of the confident, knowing subject and the erring other,
and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, invite the question: did
Foucault know in the “savoir” or in the “connaissance” sense? With “savoir,” Foucault
denotes a process through which one changes “in the course of the work that one does
in order to know”. By contrast, connaissance enables multiplication of “the knowable
objects”, manifestation of “their intelligibility” and understanding of “their rationality,
while maintaining the fixity of the inquiring subject”.41
What work did Foucault do in order to know about Iran and to be so certain that critics
were wrong? The performativities of Foucault’s passage42 above subvert the rigidity of the
distinction between savoir and connaissance since, evidently, savoir and self-displacement
can produce certain (qua confident) inquiring subjects too. And is the criterion of trans-
formation of the self enough for dichotomising connaissance and savoir? In some cases
(political issues notwithstanding), only a much needed multiplication of objective knowl-
edge may generate more radical and desirable self-displacement. A process of setting sub-
jective change on course, on its own and irrespective of validity claims and propositional
truth-content, does not suffice for something to qualify as normatively significant trans-
formative knowledge.
Self-displaced or not (or partly), Foucault emerges throughout “À quoi rêvent les Ira-
niens?” as a master of a truth opposed to the French “regime of truth” for the sake of a
people whose dreams were a question and in question. In this sense, Foucault undergoes
a transmutation from specific to universal intellectual, at least to the extent that, as a phi-
losopher, he speaks the truth “to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were
forbidden to speak the truth”.43
Specific or universal, the mobile philosopher, upon return, as a parrhesiast, challenges
public opinion with the piece of truth that he encountered. “The parrhesiastes (one who
speaks the truth) does not doubt” that “he or she disposes of the truth, as this does not
refer to an irrefutable proof or ‘certain’ knowledge. What is at stake is the courage to
speak the truth in relation to oneself and the others”44 – we may ask: independently of
propositional content, of solid knowledge, of proof of a kind? The mobile intellectual’s
“I know that they are wrong”, was followed by: “I who know very little about Iran”.45

Parrhesia
For Foucault, in the “inability to establish that full, adequate, and sufficient relationship to
ourselves, the Other intervenes”; she “meets the lack” and “makes up for this inadequacy
through a discourse” “that is not the discourse of truth through which we can establish,
fasten, and close up on itself the sovereignty we exercise over ourselves”.46 How did the
Other intervene in the philosopher’s parrhesia on the issue of Iran? Let me add another
parrhesiast, not a “laughing French”, but a migrant Iranian woman, “Atoussa H.”, who
wrote a newspaper letter, the first challenge to Foucault on Iran. In the relevant source,
she is described as a “leftist Iranian woman living in exile in Paris”;47 writing “a brief
November 1978 letter to the editors of Le Nouvel Observateur criticizing Foucault”; and
“an Iranian feminist” who signed with the pseudonym “Atoussa H.”.48 The placing of
8 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

Atoussa into the designation “feminist” is, to my knowledge, Afary and Anderson’s, and
not Atoussa’s self-description. This operation of Afary and Anderson (and of related
sources) is interesting in itself. When it comes to self-description and identity, Atoussa
identifies herself in her letter only as an “Iranian” (i.e. again, interestingly, through
ethnic-national/state identity) “living in Paris”.49
Atoussa designates those who support an Islamic government as “French Leftists”:
“Living in Paris, I am profoundly upset by the untroubled attitude of French leftists
toward the possibility of an ‘Islamic government’ that might replace the bloody tyranny
of the shah”. She personalises this designation with Foucault: “Michel Foucault, for
example, seems moved by the ‘Muslim spirituality’ that would advantageously replace,
according to him, the ferocious capitalist dictatorship that is tottering today”.50
Atoussa responds to Foucault’s praise on political spirituality with a plea to seek a piece
of knowledge/evidence: “in order to have an idea of what the ‘spirituality’ of the Quran,
applied to the letter under Ayatollah Khomeini’s type of moral order, would mean, it is
not a bad idea to reread the texts”.51 The subtext which legitimises her savoir work for con-
structing knowledge evokes research strategies of textual support, close reading and, I dare
say, “local” and “particular” knowledges of the kind that Foucault had valued in his con-
trast to universally ambitious knowledge. On this point (and later), her letter is marked by
ellipsis inserted by the newspaper editor52 who shortened her letter possibly for manage-
ability reasons of paid space, space paying off, space saved for other purposes. The “liberal”
Iranian censorship of the shah’s regime finds here a transmutation into another, certainly
incomparably “milder”, “liberal” managerial veiling: we will never know Atoussa’s full
argument, whether the omitted chunks made sharper criticisms or were irrelevant or
repetitive. This “veil of ignorance” will let us have only the following citation for
judging what Atoussa saw in Islamic sources – de-contextualizing the extracts, of
course, and itself being somewhat de-contextualized due to the imposed ellipsis that pre-
cedes and follows it, but a challenge to Foucault nevertheless.
[…] Sura 2: “Your wives are for you a field; come then to your field as you wish”. Clearly, the
man is the lord, the wife the slave; she can be used at his whim; she can say nothing. She must
wear the veil, born from the Prophet’s jealousy toward Aisha! We are not dealing here with a
spiritual parable, but rather with a choice concerning the type of society we want. Today,
unveiled women are often insulted, and young Muslim men do not themselves hide the
fact that, in the regime that they wish for, women should behave or else be punished.53

Her textual operations then shift from religious hermeneutics to political contrast: Fou-
cault’s idealised picture of his dreamed, imminent heterotopia is set against the dystopian,
concrete and accomplished Saudi Arabian Islamic heterotopia. “Spirituality? A return to
deeply rooted wellsprings? Saudi Arabia drinks from the wellspring of Islam. Hands
and heads fall, for thieves and lovers”.54
Atoussa’s contrast may be criticised for relying on an operation of homology that levels
Saudi Arabian, Suni politics with the as-yet unaccomplished political “experiment” of
Shi’ite Iran. The two cases (and corresponding countries) were very different also in
socio-political conditions in ways that invite cautious nuance rather than homogenisation
or interpretations of Iran through the lens of Saudi Arabia. But, in his response, Foucault
did not opt for such a refutation of Atoussa’s contrast, which requires more detail or more
Habermasian dialogical-argumentative engagement. We may extrapolate from his other
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 9

Iranian writings that he might have had the difference in Suni and Shi’ite religiousness in
mind when he sweepingly accused Atoussa of dismissing Islam in one blow. Nevertheless,
beyond Atoussa’s contrast, the discussion of Saudi Arabia alongside Iran would be very
revealing of the double-standards of the West and the material motivations behind
them. Most critics who see their countries’ politics of siding with the shah as deriving
from a genuine concern with human rights and liberalisation forget to answer the ques-
tion: why has the liberal US wholeheartedly supported Saudi Arabia all along?
Be that as it may, Atoussa perceptively unveils what I see as an often unwittingly
enacted subtle racism on the part of many Western scholars: to expect or summon that
the Other accept a regulation, a measure, a settlement that those scholars would never
accept for themselves and for their own countries. “It seems that for the Western Left,
which lacks humanism, Islam is desirable … for other people”.55 By contrast, we may
add in hindsight, the rights of the Western self (the deconstructionist and critical intellec-
tual included) are non-negotiable, regardless of varied deconstructions, reformulations or
multi-perspectival critiques of human rights discourses.
Atoussa then challenges Foucault by speaking with the voice of a cautious “we”,
qualified by the quantifier “many”: “Many Iranians are, like me, distressed and desperate
about the thought of an ‘Islamic’ government”.56 Why? Atoussa explains her position
through recourse to local (insiders’) knowledge: “We know what it is. Everywhere
outside Iran, Islam serves as a cover for feudal or pseudorevolutionary oppression”.57
Here we have a leap on her part from the actual to the possible. Does the actual rule
out the possibility of a new and different start, a re-interpretation or even transcendence
of the religious passages in question and the related practices? Would that not be an Isla-
mophobic sweeping incrimination of any fresh Islamic effort? Indeed, Foucault charges
her with Islamophobia, yet without unpacking the point. We may extrapolate from the
rest of Foucault’s Iranian writings that the answer he might have given comes from
how he viewed Shi’ite priesthood and re-interpretation of religious texts.
Among the Shi’ite clergy, religious authority is not determined by a hierarchy. One follows
only the one to whom one wants to listen. The Grand Ayatollahs of the moment, those who,
in facing down the king, his police, and the army, have just caused an entire people to come
out into the streets, were not enthroned by anybody. They were listened to. This is true even
in the smallest communities, where neighborhood and village mullahs gather around them-
selves those attracted by their words. From these volunteers comes their subsistence, from
them comes what is necessary to support the disciples they train, and from them comes
their influence.58

Foucault attaches to this kerygmatic anarchy an unusual and unlikely vocabulary of praise
on “denouncing injustice”, singling out culpabilities and prescribing: “But from them also
comes the unrelenting plea to denounce injustice, to criticise the government, to rise up
against unacceptable measures, and to mete out blame and to prescribe”.59 Foucault,
the social philosopher, blithely focuses on actual agents (in this case, the Ayatollahs)
dealing out justice. He rejects only philosophically authorised normativity, because he
sees it as shaping moralist subjects by dictating or prescribing how they should be, but
this rejection does not extent to the authority of the local agent.
To return to Atoussa, it is very clear that she also condemns the West-supported
tyranny of the shah and acknowledges that “Islam-alas! -is the only means of expression
for a muzzled people”. But she pleas for more knowledge: “the Western liberal Left needs to
10 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

know that Islamic law can become a dead weight on societies hungering for change. The
Left should not let itself be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease”.60
Was the mere intervention of the parrhesiast Other enough to disrupt the matter of
course of the philosopher’s utopian set destination? Does this dialogical exchange
between subjects speaking their truth (regardless of judgment of content) enact and
deliver the political goods that some Foucauldians expect from parrhesia?
Foucault responds to Atoussa’s parrhesia with opaque engagement, selective attention
and a mixture of averted and downward61 gaze. His 16 lines begin with the complaint that
Atoussa “did not read the article she criticizes”. We may ask: is it enough just to speak
“your truth” in the name of polysemy and non-fixity of meaning and selfhood? Certainly
it is not enough for Foucault who focuses on some of the content of the letter and on its
performativity and who indicates that a good reading and a correct interpretation (against
misreading) are important steps prior to speaking publicly. But, somehow, it seems
enough for many Foucauldians who are enthusiastic about parrhesia and celebrate the
claim of speaking the truth rather than the claim to truth and to its testing.
Foucault, indeed, accuses Atoussa of misreading him. Now propositional content, accu-
racy and validity claims acquire significance. Before speaking one’s truth one must read
and get the content of what is read right. “If there had been in Mme. H.’s letter only a mis-
reading, I would not have responded to it”. Just as Foucault overlooks the parrhesiast’s (i.e.
Atoussa’s) concerns about women and does not comment on them, he might as well
ignore a letter that, in misreading him, ceases to merit a response.
But it [Atoussa’s letter] contains two intolerable things: (1) It merges together all the aspects,
all the forms, and all the potentialities of Islam within a single expression of contempt, for the
sake of rejecting them in their entirety under the thousand-year-old reproach of “fanaticism”.
(2) It suspects all Westerners of being interested in Islam only due to scorn for Muslims.
What could we say about a Westerner who would scorn Islam? The problem of Islam as a
political force is an essential one for our time and the coming years. In order to approach it
with a minimum of intelligence, the first condition is not to begin by bringing in hatred.62

Though the prescience and pertinence of the last sentence cannot be overestimated, it
should not obscure other operations of the above passage. Mobilised to answer by the
“intolerable” and lumping all reaction into the category of hatred, Foucault psychologises
and de-materializes Atoussa’s ethico-political objections. Any disruption of the liberal
fantasy of conflict- and politics-free possibility within heterotopian otherness is de-politi-
cised and reduced to phobias and hatred between internal divisions of Otherness (e.g.
secular, migrant Iranians and religious, rooted Iranians).
Ironically, another point that Foucault ignored in his response was Atoussa’s following
accusation and objection about Foucault’s position on minorities: “It is also written that
minorities have the right to freedom, on the condition that they do not injure the majority.
At what point do the minorities begin to ‘injure the majority’?”.63 Atoussa’s objections
unveil the unexpectedly liberal substratum of Foucault’s position on negative duties of
avoiding injury. However, Foucault’s reliance on a “negative freedom” outlook concerning
the relation of minorities and majorities is not as unjustifiable as Atoussa implies. In fact,
her objection reflects an overgeneralisation easily deconstructible through many historic-
political examples of minorities ruling over majorities or being strategically manipulated64
for effecting undemocratic impositions upon majorities. Consider, for instance, the ruling
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 11

few of ancient empires, later of the ancient regime and of class divisions. The numerical
meaning of minority is different from the value added to it when used to signify the sup-
pressed, weak and exploited. There is no compelling argument why the term “minority”
should always designate the morally appealing category of the victim or of the oppressed.
This positioning of the numerically few should be examined through evidence and work
that one has to do in order to know the share enjoyed by a minority in a specific distri-
bution of the real (if I may use J. Rancière’s parlance here). Atoussa romanticises min-
orities (and Foucault quite often did the same in his other writings, as is typically done
today too). A minority, politically weak in some ways due to numbers, may in other
ways be, again, politically, very strong and regulatory due to powerful positioning
within the partage du sensible. Nevertheless, as concerns Iran’s specific conditions since
1979 and indications of this course already in 1978, Atoussa’s objection was to the point.
Foucault perhaps felt that Atoussa had been interpellated to speak as a Western, mod-
ernised, rational subject. More generally, he must have felt that the Western lack of sym-
pathy toward Iran reflected Islamophobia, ignorance of Western criminal meddling, a
modern-liberal self-satisfaction with secularism and a developmentalism that saw the
shah as the authoritarian yet tragic figure who had to keep up the modernisation vision
while ruling backward people.65 Against assuming traditional-reactionary inadaptability
to liberalisation Foucault emphasised that Iranians are denouncing “a modernization
that is itself an archaism”.66

Dreamworld
Foucault defensively connects the obligation to pay attention to utopian Islamic possibility
with the ultimate legitimacy that heroic thanatos bestows upon a movement (a recurrent
theme in Foucault’s Iranian writings). “Since people protested and were killed in Iran
while shouting ‘Islamic government’, one had an elementary obligation to ask oneself
what content was given to the expression and what forces drove it”.67 Thanatoptic, thana-
tourist, the long-established interest of the traveller in actual forces of change blocks atten-
tion, let alone response, to Atoussa’s interrogation of the utopianization of the current, to
her plea for subjectivities that have to be created beyond available, drastic choice. For
Atoussa had asked: “after twenty five years of silence and oppression, do the Iranian
people have no other choice than that between the SAVAK and religious fanaticism?”.68
Foucault probably noticed only the desperate tone of the question, rather than its
content, and normalised it as just another sign of Western publics’ perceptible annoyance
against which he had already set his own mobilisation:
What is it about what has happened in Iran that a whole lot of people, on the left and on the
right, find somewhat irritating? The Iran affair and the way in which it has taken place have
not aroused the same kind of untroubled sympathy as Portugal, for example, or Nicaragua.69

Foucault castigates the averted gaze when foreign politics is concerned and the western
habitual reaction of indifference to news that would spoil one’s holidays. “I’m not
saying that Nicaragua, in the middle of summer, at a time when people are tanning them-
selves in the sun, aroused a great deal of interest”.70 But, in the case of Iran, he detects an
unusual reception of a rebellion against a most horrific regime whose liberal gloss had
12 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

being constructed by its Western allies. “I soon felt a small, epidermic reaction [on the part
of the Western public] that was not one of immediate sympathy”.71
However, Atoussa’s question about a way beyond the drastic choice of the shah and
Khomeini and her temporal qualification of it with the phrase “after twenty five years of
silence and oppression” operates within what I term “boundary discourse”, exploding per-
ceived limits and creating spaces of distance from binarisms such as Islamophilia/Islamo-
phobia and “modernization”/spirituality. Foucault cannot answer her question not only
because he focuses on actual social agents but also because, following his usual course,
he seeks in Iran the non-liberal/non-modern, eruptive, radical Other. Atoussa demarcates
the middle and transcending ground not just as future possibility but also as a counterfac-
tual, past opportunity nipped in the bud: her metonymic poles of undesirable choice,
SAVAK and Khomeini, are temporally juxtaposed to 25 years of silence and oppression.
What alternative path was blocked exactly 25 years before that summer of 1978?
I can think of many summer events in various elsewheres that did not manage to
disturb the merry tanning, but one of those events is most relevant here.72 In August
1953, a UK and US orchestrated coup deposed Iran’s democratic leader Mossadeq,
restored the shah to power and “modernized” the organisation of the SAVAK. The
global publics (especially of the involved countries) missed the event during the time-hon-
oured snoring in the sun-bed. That summer (and until 1978) Foucault had not gone off-
course; he had written nothing about Iran.
In August 1953, Foucault holidayed in Italy, where he re-read Nietzsche’s Untimely
Meditations through a Heideggerian lens.73 Still, Atoussa’s subtext of the Mossadeq
alternative could strike a note of familiarity, though in a 25 years hindsight effect: Foucault,
who knew little about Iran, must have heard much about the coup at a time when the
remembrance of what was violently stopped from becoming an actual force was both
dim and painful. In the Iranian imaginary, the coup was a tragic lesson in inability to
defeat the “liberal” West by the liberal means of Mossadeq. What had led Foucault
astray, the faith in the nouveau and inconnu, rupture and radical force, had, for
different reasons, led astray many secular Iranians who had embraced Khomeini.
Western “liberalism” could not be deposed by irenic tactics such as Mossadeq’s. It
could only be overthrown, and was in fact deposed, by non-liberal forces. Foucault con-
curred with some secular Iranians on the idea that Khomeini was produced by a desperate
political resort to the only existing force that could at that time depose the shah.74
Foucault, nevertheless, comes across as knowing too little about the 1953 coup. “Oddly
enough, in his extensive reporting on the revolution’s genesis, Foucault makes only spora-
dic, quite uninformative reference to the Mossadegh matter”;75 oddly also for the philoso-
pher who acknowledged foreign interference, he overlooks “the latest in a series of foreign
interventions and imperialist indignities to which Iran had been subjected since the dawn
of the century” (ibid).76 His lack of knowledge matched his concern “to see that blame for
the traumas Iran’s ‘modernization’ had produced stayed affixed to the Pahlavis, two dic-
tatorial rulers whom he stereotypically configures as classic Oriental despots”. Hence, “the
often covert, though nonetheless weighty forces of Empire-Czarist Russian, British, and
their American postwar incarnation-are, in effect, relegated to the margins of his analysis
and thus de facto diminished in their significance” (ibid). The travelling philosopher,
coming from a Fernand Braudel context of historical research, was a newcomer to geopo-
litical situations which, to be understood, also require event-based historiography.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 13

Foucault was unable to answer Atoussa’s plea for another solution away from the
drastic choice also because, against “the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of Mossadeq”,77 he had
endorsed Khomeini’s religious nationalism. Given Foucault’s standard positions (from
which Iran did not manage to displace him), Mossadeq was not just a historically bypassed
force; he was too “Enlightened”, “modern” and committed to counterfactual humanist
possibilities such as democracy, women’s rights, human rights and progress to merit Fou-
cault’s interest. Some of present-day Foucault’s detractors ignore (as much as he did) that
the concatenated effects of the coup blocked alternative paths. Or, worse (and unlike Fou-
cault) they gloss over the horror of the shah regime and the complicities of Anglo-Amer-
ican governments. Against such sanitizations, Reza Baraheni, the Iranian scholar and poet
who was imprisoned by the shah, detailed in 1976 the connection between the coup
against Mossadeq, the Western role in it and the regime that was thus established since
1963.78 Ervand Abrahamian also helps us take notice of the now ignored facts:
the coup tarred America with the British brush: being perceived as the “colonial power”, a
perception that created deep distrust between Iran and United States. It set up a dictatorship
that became increasingly unpopular and corrupt. It put a nail in the coffin of the same mon-
archy by inseparably linking it to the imperial powers. It discredited the army by identifying it
with the shah, the CIA, and the MI6. It destroyed the secular parties – both the Tudeh and the
National Front – and so paved the way for the emergence of Khomeini’s religious opposition.
The “neutralist” Mossadeq was exchanged for the “fundamentalist” Khomeini. The Mossa-
deq movement failed to bring national liberation; but the same liberation eventually came
in the shape of the Khomeini movement. The coup’s imprint on Iranian culture was
equally deep: the suspicion that sinister “foreign hands” controlled Iran; and the conviction
that only force could forestall repetition of 1953. In short, the coup struck a hard blow at lib-
eralism as well as at socialism and secular nationalism.79

But, sharing with his later detractors a similar neglect of some historical details, Foucault
swung into an (un)timely self-interruption in 1978 that, ironically for the archaeologist
and genealogist, did not go back enough. Although we may agree with Scullion80 that
“Foucault’s actual motivations cannot now be determined with any certainty”, we may
add that Foucault’s certainties about complicities of knowledge and Enlightened reason,
his formalist utopics and his then anti-modern passion blocked a view of past counterfac-
tual possibilities. Foucault’s lack of adequate displacement also blocked attention to then-
contemporary warnings (such as Atoussa’s) that could have produced a synergy of fore-
boding and more radical and nuanced critical position.
In Foucault’s eyes, Iranians (unlike Marxist and utopian socialists) were dreaming
about nothing other than the removal of the shah. “Furthermore (and here one can
speak of Khomeini’s political sense), this collective will has been given one object, one
target and one only, namely, the departure of the shah”.81 Devoid of the content that
would specify or indicate the direction in which the torrential current was drawing
Iran, Foucault’s dreamworld of political spirituality, hazy in the distance, was praised
for absence of long-term plans (an absence enabling volonté general) and for formalist-
processual negativity. In my view, perhaps there is no better example than Foucault’s fas-
cination with the (real or imagined) ethico-political void and seriality attributed to Iranian
mobilisation for illustrating what is wrong with formalist utopias and with the facile
assumption that minimalism and indeterminacy protect from degenerations into
totalitarianism.82
14 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

As for what he philosophically dreamed about, as I have already indicated, in Foucault’s

philosophical dreamworlds of dichotomous, enthusiastic prose, judgment is indicted and
contrasted to exalted alternatives such as imaginary leaps, creativity and elation: “I can’t
help but dream about a kind of critique that would try not to judge but to bring an
oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life”. The critique that he idealised (in other
words, the critique of his dreams) “would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the
wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it”. Such a critique “would multiply
not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.
Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better”. The other kind of critique, that
which “hands down sentences”, “sends me to sleep; I’d like a critique of scintillating leaps
of the imagination”.83

Conclusion
While a traveller in Iran, Foucault perceived a utopian impulse of quasi-libidinal invest-
ment in the urgent demand to get rid of the shah and an unwavering commitment to
such a formalist vision even at the cost of death (the fighter’s own, but, after the
victory, chiefly of others). Thanatoptic, thanatourist, the “innocent”, curious gaze of the
Western traveller reveals a philosophical dreamworld of elation and fascination with
“real life” rather than with weighing evidence, judging and obtaining knowledge. While
apparently off-course (moving eastward and away from state-centred methods), Foucault
gazed at Iran through the lens of his certainties and fixations.
At least, his was an engaged eye. But this does not make up for a blindness and deafness
that has not been just Foucault’s. In this sense, against the tendency to view the Iran
episode in Foucault’s intellectual life as aberration, I have argued that it unveils deeper ten-
sions of his outlook on knowledge, utopia and international politics. It interrogates main-
stream dependencies on Foucault’s political philosophy and endorsements of his mistrust
of knowledge. Finally, it presents a challenge to current, culturalist understandings of
world politics that operate through categories of anonymous power and neglect geopoli-
tical, global agents and complexities of event-based history and international relations.

Notes
1. Ahluwalia, “Post-structuralism’s colonial roots,” 598.
2. For more information on the number of Foucault’s journalistic pieces, his related interviews
and responses, and on the details of his journeys to Iran, see Afary and Anderson, Foucault
and the Iranian Revolution.
3. Jabri, “Michel Foucault’s analytics,” 67.
4. Alshaibi, “The Intellectual Destroyer,” 2.
5. For an informative account, see Elahi, “East-Struck,” 158.
6. McCall, “Ambivalent Modernities,” 30.
7. Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson are the scholars who edited all of Foucault’s writings on the
Iranian revolution in English and drew the Anglophone world’s attention to his Iran experi-
ence. For their sharp criticisms of Foucault, see their comments on Foucault’s essays on Iran
in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
8. Honig, “What Foucault Saw,” 2.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 15

9. Despite the well-known, Foucauldian dismissive comments on utopias, his writings on Iran
are fraught with utopian elements. For a discussion of such elements, see Beaulieu, “Towards
a liberal Utopia.”
10. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 222.
11. Ibid.
12. Beaulieu, “Towards a liberal Utopia.”
13. Significantly, enthusiasm originates from en + theos, “breathing god into the other” or
“feeling god”, and such connotations are especially relevant to the political elation of the
revolt and of Foucault’s reception of it.
14. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 197–8.
15. Ibid., 253.
16. Ibid.
17. I approach some individual and collective identities not only as real and existent (in a non-
essentialist sense) but also as invested with libidinal energy. I would argue that they are, inter
alia, Id-entities. But this is merely stated here for reasons of clarity. It cannot be argued out
for reasons of space and of remote relevance to the main argument.
18. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 196.
19. Arguing this point out would sidetrack us here, but the claim will become clearer in a later
section where I contrast Mossadeq’s nationalism with the 1978 Iranian religious nationalism.
20. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 253.
21. Abrahamian, “The 1953 coup,” 184. Operations of such meddlers, rightly condemned by
Foucault, and certainly not limited to Iran, also involved the following: ‘British officials
assured others, as well as themselves, that the National Front [Mossadeq’s party – M.P.]
was “nothing but a noisy bunch of malcontents”; that Mossadeq - a “wily Oriental” - was
“wild”, “erratic”, “eccentric”, “crazy”, “gangster-like”, “fanatical”, “absurd”, “dictatorial”,
“demagogic”, “inflammatory”, and “single-mindedly obstinate”; and that Iranians were by
nature “child-like”, “tiresome and headstrong”, “un- willing to accept facts”, “volatile and
unstable”, “sentimentally mystical”, “unprepared to listen to reason and common sense”,
and “swayed by emotions devoid of positive content”. Abrahamian, “The 1953 coup,” 193.
22. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 221.
23. Ibid., 203.
24. Alshaibi, “The Intellectual Destroyer,” 13.
25. This orientalism is inverted because, unlike the standard attitude toward what is seen as auth-
entic in the East (and further on) amenable to a Western lens of modernising intervention, it
turns the East into a positive category that should resist Western intervention and remain
pure and uncontaminated by Western categories.
26. Scullion, “Michel Foucault the Orientalist,” 24.
27. Quoted in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 3.
28. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 253.
29. I am referring to Claudie and Jacques Broyelle’s article in Le Matin, March 24, 1979. See
Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
30. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 249.
31. Ibid., 267.
32. Ibid., 266.
33. Foucault, Wrong-doing, truth-telling, 253–69.
34. Ibid., 263.
35. Ibid., 264.
36. Error’s etymology and meaning: “a deviation from truth made through ignorance or inadver-
tence, a mistake,” also “offense against morality or justice; transgression, wrong-doing, sin;”
from Old French error “mistake, flaw, defect, heresy,” from Latin errorem (nominative error)
“a wandering, straying, a going astray; meandering; doubt, uncertainty;” also “a figurative
going astray, mistake,” from errare “to wander; to err”. From early 14c. as “state of believing
or practicing what is false or heretical; false opinion or belief, heresy.” From late 14c. as
16 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

“deviation from what is normal; abnormality, aberration.” From 1726 as “difference between
observed value and true value.” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=error.
37. Foucault, Michel Foucault Live, 225.
38. For a discussion of the Iran episode in association with Foucault’s limit-experience, Papas-
tephanou, “LimitExperience Limited.”
39. Some commentators (e.g. Beaulieu, “Towards a liberal Utopia”) explain Foucault’s later work
as a displacement to an important degree influenced by his Iran experience of
disillusionment.
40. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 209 (my italics).
41. Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault, 256.
42. In a like manner, performativities of some of his other works which reveal the subject as a
meticulous reader of archives sensitive to appropriate judgment deconstruct or complicate
his rhetorical, declarative and constative-level assertions about the “intellectual destroyer
of evidence”.
43. Foucault mentioned this in his interview with Gilles Deleuze in 1972. For the full transcript,
accessed December 20, 2017. see https://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-
conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
44. Smeyers and Waghid, “Cosmopolitanism, self and other,” 457.
45. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 298.
46. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 378.
47. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 91.
48. Ibid., 181.
49. I see her as a masked parrhesiast whose pseudonym, Atoussa, is to me yet another puzzle.
What’s in this name and why does she choose it? Being the name of the ancient emperor
Darius’ wife, is this pseudonym a subtle reference to a pre-Islamic Persian past where a
woman was an empress? What about imperialism, conquest and the oppression of large
populations? What are we to make out of this pseudonym for the identity of the author?
Does the author unveil herself as a feminist unaware of other political undertones of what
she subscribes to?
50. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 209.
51. Ibid.
52. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 93.
53. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 209.
54. Ibid. Consider here how Foucault, who, in his response to Atoussa, bypassed this objection,
later comes to acknowledge the newly accomplished reality of violence by using terms similar
to those of Atoussa about heads and hands falling. In his last response to the Iran issue that I
have cited in a previous section, he mentioned: “People saw an apology for this form of justice
that is not even a kind of popular tribunal, but rather the cutting of throats. No, no” (Fou-
cault, Wrong-doing, truth-telling, 264). Consider in a like manner Foucault’s statement that
“It is certainly not shameful to change one’s opinions, but there is no reason to say that one’s
opinion has changed when one is against hands being chopped off today, after having been
against the tortures of the SAVAK yesterday” (Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 266).
55. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 209.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 202.
59. Ibid.
60. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 210 (my italics).
61. Consider here, for instance, Foucault’s concluding sentence that “In order to approach
[Islam] with a minimum of intelligence, the first condition is not to begin by bringing in
hatred”. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 210 (my italics).
62. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 210 (my italics).
63. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 209.
64. Consider here Hitler’s manipulation of the Sudeten minority.
 CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 17

65. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 195.

66. Ibid.
67. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 210.
68. Atoussa, “An Iranian Woman Writes,” 209 (my italics).
69. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 250.
70. Ibid (my italics).
71. Ibid., 195.
72. I refer here to places in whose “destiny” roughly the same Western “meddlers” (chastised by
Foucault) were deeply implicated. I place the category of the meddler in quote-marks because
I believe that it itself requires a deconstruction of its possibly de-materializing undertones.
Meddling evokes a negative sense of curiosity, inquisitiveness, blundering interest on
others’ affairs, and other such connotations that obscure material, profit- or geopolitics-
related reasons for interfering or regulating extra-state, even global issues.
73. Eribon, Michel Foucault: Eine Biographie, 92.
74. Consider here also Foucault’s opening sentences in “À quoi rêvent les Iraniens?” about the
Western hold on Iran: “‘They will never let go of us of their own will. No more than they
did in Vietnam.’ I wanted to respond that they are even less ready to let go of you than
Vietnam because of oil, because of the Middle East”. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,”
203. Foucault was correct on that, and something similar concerned another “elsewhere”:
Cyprus in 1955. Anthony Eden’s cynical admission in his memoirs that Cyprus could not
be given self-determination due to oil verifies Foucault’s geostrategic analysis more
broadly. For Eden (Eden, The Memoirs of Eden, 415), the British had a strong claim in
Cyprus so long as British “industrial life depends on oil supplies from the Persian Gulf”.
75. Scullion, “Michel Foucault the Orientalist,” 26.
76. Ibid.
77. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 221.
78. Baraheni, “Terror and Iran”. Baraheni inter alia wrote: “The CIA re-created the monarchy,
built up the SAVAK and trained all its prominent members, and stood by the Shah and his
secret police as their powerful ally. Iran became the police state it is now”. Material from his
text (and weighing evidence would be a valuable operation here) is very useful for challenging
the position of some Foucauldian commentators (both opponents and proponents) who
seem to assume that, the “liberal” support to shah’s “liberalizing” politics by “liberal”
states was, despite some failures, liberal or at least more liberal than what followed. Consider,
for instance” “thousands of men and women have been summarily executed during the last
twenty-three years. More than 300,000 people have been in and out of prison during the last
nineteen years of the existence of SAVAK; an average of 1,500 people are arrested every
month. In one instance alone, American-trained counterinsurgency troops of the Iranian
Army and SAVAK killed more than 6,000 people on June 5, 1963. According to Amnesty
International’s Annual Report for 1974–1975 ‘the total number of political prisoners has
been reported at times throughout the year [1975] to be anything from 25,000 to
100,000’”. “Martin Ennals, secretary general of Amnesty International, reports in his intro-
duction to Baraheni’s book: ‘The Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the
highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a
history of torture which is beyond belief.’” And consider the following as concerns what
some Western liberal states had supported and intellectuals had overlooked; what realities
give to collective identity a gruesome though politically operative twist (i.e. people unite in
suffering, torture and, ultimately, in the determination to free themselves from oppression);
and Baraheni’s faith in some modern principles while unmasking the betrayal of (and lip
service to) those principles (and of modernisation) by the “liberal” shah and his “liberal”
allies: “There were days when seven prisoners of diverse backgrounds were pushed into
this cell. We got ourselves accustomed to sleeping while standing. Some had dysentery
because of bad food and fear. Some could not stand because of sore feet or burned backs
or pulled out toenails. We breathed into each other’s faces. All of us had been kidnapped
by the SAVAK; none of us had seen any warrants. Nobody outside knew where we were.
18 M. PAPASTEPHANOU

We didn’t know ourselves where we were, because we had all been brought to the prison
blindfolded. The seven of us could have easily run a school, or a supermarket, or a
factory. Imagine 100,000 educated men and women in prison while 75 percent of the
whole nation is illiterate! Imagine hundreds of doctors in prison when every fifty villages
in the country have only one doctor! Imagine roads awaiting construction while engineers
are rotting in jails!”. And: “Of the fourteen people I met in prison cells during my imprison-
ment in 1973, at least two had been asked to become members of the SAVAK, and upon
refusal they had been tortured. Everything I had said during my stay in the US in the aca-
demic year of 1972–1973, before my imprisonment, had been reported to SAVAK, which
operates on a global scale”, ibid.
79. Abrahamian, “The 1953 coup,” 213–4.
80. Scullion, “Michel Foucault the Orientalist,” 36.
81. Foucault, “Foucault and His Critics,” 252.
82. On my objections to formalist and indeterminate utopias and for my defense of a degree of
utopian determinacy, see Papastephanou, Educated Fear.
83. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 323.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Marianna Papastephanou has studied and researched at Cardiff University, UK, and at Humboldt
University, Berlin, Germany. She is the author of articles and books on various topics of political
philosophy such as utopianism, cosmopolitanism and the modern vs postmodern divide. She is cur-
rently Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Cyprus and Professor II, in the
Department of Education, at the University of Oslo, Norway.

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